A nice Rohmer film. Fans of his work will like it a lot, and it's not likely to win over any non-lovers or even newbies. I'm a big fan myself, so it won me over effortlessly. I'd rank it lower than most of the Rohmer films that I've seen, but, then again, I've never disliked one of his films and most of them I absolutely adore. Rendezvous in Paris is made up of three short stories about near-affairs in Paris. The first, "Rendezvous at 7 O'clock," is about a young woman who finds out that her boyfriend sees other women. Through a set of amazing circumstances, she meets his other girlfriend. The second, "The Benches of Paris," is the best. It is about a teacher who is trying to seduce a young woman whose relationship with her longtime boyfriend seems to be on the rocks. We watch them as they walk around the parks and other scenic areas of the French capital. The third, "Mother and Son 1907," is about a pretentious painter who comes up with elaborate philosophies about his love life. He is set to spend the weekend with a Swedish girl, a cousin of a friend, but, when he runs into a beautiful, young, and married girl outside of the Picasso Museum, he has to run after her. The acting is great, especially Aurore Rauscher, the woman in the second section of the film. Rohmer paints these relationships so perfectly; they seem so simple, but they are rife with complexities. Contemplating them makes my head swirl. 8/10.
11 Reviews
Rohmer does Paris in three mini vignettes
raskimono27 October 2008
What is love? and can you explain it. Using three meetings at different locations , Rohmer creates a parable on the intricate and surprising nature of love. The first story about a rendezvous at seven is the best. Insidious in its nature, it plants the seeds of doubt that blossom into the tale of two women and two men, each seeking and expecting divergent results. Filled with coincidences, all three tales are, it presents the surprises we don't see coming.
The second story which is kind of dull or more demanding depending on taste, follows a couple meeting up in many public locations. The female character is afraid to meet in private despite the urgings of her male lover and when she does make the leap, the consequences will forever change the relationship.
The goat of the pack is the final vignette, a story titled after a Picasso painting that features prominently in story. Again the obvious is pushed aside for the unexpected and there is a certain breezy, plush ending to the proceedings that seems to jar with what has become.
A comedy in three parts, there is a chorus group that is interspersed and opens each story. Cherubic in nature, the songs present certain adages on the nature of love and life.
A mixture of his moral tales with his comedies and proverb series, it is the lesser of each but sub-par Rohmer is still superior to most filmmakers. His low frills style of film making which a previous reviewer called cheap tells him how little he knows about the edict of the French New wave, the only die-hard adherent remained Rohmer, his rules, a quantifier closer to the Dogma'95 tradition of cinema. It is cinema of the heart at its finest.
The second story which is kind of dull or more demanding depending on taste, follows a couple meeting up in many public locations. The female character is afraid to meet in private despite the urgings of her male lover and when she does make the leap, the consequences will forever change the relationship.
The goat of the pack is the final vignette, a story titled after a Picasso painting that features prominently in story. Again the obvious is pushed aside for the unexpected and there is a certain breezy, plush ending to the proceedings that seems to jar with what has become.
A comedy in three parts, there is a chorus group that is interspersed and opens each story. Cherubic in nature, the songs present certain adages on the nature of love and life.
A mixture of his moral tales with his comedies and proverb series, it is the lesser of each but sub-par Rohmer is still superior to most filmmakers. His low frills style of film making which a previous reviewer called cheap tells him how little he knows about the edict of the French New wave, the only die-hard adherent remained Rohmer, his rules, a quantifier closer to the Dogma'95 tradition of cinema. It is cinema of the heart at its finest.
Les dragueurs de Paris...
skepticskeptical3 July 2021
Eric Rohmer's Les rendez-vous de Paris brought back so many memories from my first summer in Paris, at the age of twenty-six. In my experience, the place was teeming with dragueuers, and the scenes and locales of this film are all familiar, reminding me of how intrinsically social French society is.
I have to wonder how Parisians are faring through the Coronapocalypse. No more double and quadruple social kissing, Je suppose. C'est triste, un peu. I cannot really imagine Paris filled with masked people moving to the other side of the street upon sighting another person. And yet, here we are. I hope that Paris recovers.
I have to wonder how Parisians are faring through the Coronapocalypse. No more double and quadruple social kissing, Je suppose. C'est triste, un peu. I cannot really imagine Paris filled with masked people moving to the other side of the street upon sighting another person. And yet, here we are. I hope that Paris recovers.
Mixed trio of love stories in modern-day Paris
howie736 January 2005
I first saw this in a cinema and was immediately disappointed with its low-budget production values. The sound and lensing is very poor, so much so that the blurred effect of the projected image eventually gave me a headache. However, the three individual stories of love save the film from its shoddy technical features. The first has a clever climax; while the second deals with complex issues in a sombre way, leaving the third to close this dynamic in its own unique fashion. The real star of the film is Paris itself, used as a constant backdrop to the trials and tribulations of the film. This is really a film for lovers of Paris rather than Rohmer's directorial style and is probably one of his most accessible film to date.
Neatly allusive and realistic tales of romance, with lots of Paris
jimcheva6 August 2021
All three tales here reference romance, if in very different ways, and Paris is generously used, including some little known spots. The dynamic between young men and women is credibly yet delicately drawn, with more than a touch of understated humor along the way. The whole film has a slight sense of an exercise in style such as the Coen brothers sometimes undertake. It is very French in its verbal examination of ideas and relationships: "I never date painters, I like paintings too much"; "Picasso is never Picasso, that is what makes him Picasso". A gentle social satire runs through much of it along with an indulgent view of youth - one very much feels that all these people will view life very differently a decade later. But for now they're young, and thinking a little too profoundly, and flirting far too easily, and yes playing a few games. Those who are like them, or remember when they were, will smile and happily follow them as they form light memories to look back on from a weightier future.
Encounters and missings
valadas19 December 2013
Eric Rohmer usually explores with exceptional psychological talent what is in the minds and hearts of ordinary people in what concerns love relations. In his movie people reflect and talk thoroughly about what they feel (or suppose they feel) in what regards those relations and live apparently superficial events although very meaningful and sometimes unexpected and surprising. In this movie the first two stories are about love and infidelity treated in a humorous way without prejudice of their psychological depth. Human beings are like that and they not always realize what they really feel. The third story is of love and infatuation, of illusion and disillusion when you think that because you love someone, automatically the loved one also loves you which seldom is true. The city of Paris atmosphere where the three stories take place is particularly favourable to such sentiments and situations for its romantic urban environment. We have then here the usual Rohmer's characters: authentic human beings somewhat doubtful about their feelings and thoughts (though they sometimes suppose they are certain about that) who now and then have to face situations for which they were not prepared. Not very dramatic but not superficial anyway.
a love letter to Paris
g-821138 April 2020
Journeys End ...
writers_reign19 February 2007
Warning: Spoilers
... in lover's meetings as Feste tells us in Twelfth Night and Rohmer appears to have taken this as his starting point. Rather surprisingly it is relatively late in the canon, now some twelve years old it feels more like the stuff he was turning out forty years ago. Essentially this is our old friend the portmanteau movie, three films for the price of one. In this case love/romance is the recurring motif and none of the three stories is resolved satisfactorily. In the opener a girl who is very much in love discovers that her boyfriend is cheating on her; in the second, a girl is living with a man with whom she has fallen out of love and seeing, though not sleeping with, a second man. About to become the lover of the second man she realizes that her supposedly dull live-in lover is enjoying an assignation - whilst supposedly out of town - at the very hotel which she has selected for her own romantic rendez-vous whilst in the third a painter who has been 'fixed up' with a Swedish girl abandons her when he forms an instant attraction to a girl he sees in the street, who turns out to be newly married.
Rohmer's interest seems to be in turning over rocks and observing what kind of creatures scuttle from under them; he will follow them for a while and then leave them to find their own way back or not, as the case may be. As often with Rohmer a great deal of the pleasure is in seeing Paris in all its aspects. It probably won't convert anyone who isn't already a fan but neither did this, the tenth Rohmer film I've seen, make me resolve to give up on him.
Rohmer's interest seems to be in turning over rocks and observing what kind of creatures scuttle from under them; he will follow them for a while and then leave them to find their own way back or not, as the case may be. As often with Rohmer a great deal of the pleasure is in seeing Paris in all its aspects. It probably won't convert anyone who isn't already a fan but neither did this, the tenth Rohmer film I've seen, make me resolve to give up on him.
The 3 Stages of Trivial Adultery
caspian197815 July 2017
Not one of Rohmer's best works, Rendezvous in Paris lacks the passion, the seduction as well as the lust that is found in most of his films. Set in 3 Acts, the story has a mixture of pre-Seinfeld coincidences that interlock the three stories together. Since the connections are not profound or at least comical, the audience is doomed to lose interest in not only the story line but also the characters involved. Most of the characters on screen are only present for around twenty minutes, this does not give the audience enough time to connect or care about the circumstances that they are involved in. The only saving grace the movie has is its moral (or lack of one) involving glimpses of relationships and the need, or want or fear of adultery. In Act 1, we witness when adultery goes wrong. Act 2, the fear of getting caught, and finally we see the need and interest in committing adultery. Other than that, the story lacks much of what is needed for a successful movie. Which includes, filming permits. A great drinking game while watching this movie is to drink every time you see someone in the background look at the camera. This was not only obvious throughout the story, it reminded you that you were watching a movie.
Pleasant film, seems like a film school project
kickstand21 February 1999
This little film (actually 3 separate films) looks as if it was shot as a college film school thesis. The characters all seem to be students, academics, and artists, exactly the kind of people who populate such films! The characters don't seem to be experiencing any romantic epiphanies, either, but rather the filmmaker seems to be exploring the kind of questions of how-do-you-fall-in-love-and-who-with that are so ... collegiate.
I found it mildly diverting; my wife found it a good cure for her insomnia.
As a travelogue, it provides a great tour of the parks of Paris, and glimpses of the Metro and city streets.
I found it mildly diverting; my wife found it a good cure for her insomnia.
As a travelogue, it provides a great tour of the parks of Paris, and glimpses of the Metro and city streets.
Reasons to keep walking and talking and flirting
philosopherjack9 July 2021
Warning: Spoilers
Eric Rohmer's Rendezvous in Paris could almost evoke a rather plaintive response - the work of a man in his mid-70's, immersing himself in protagonists four or five decades younger, obsessively examining and reexamining the mechanics of love and attraction, as if in search of something that tragically got away. The film's sparseness - it was made under extremely minimal conditions, with just a handful of closing technical credits - gives it the sense of a modern pilgrimage of sorts, albeit that the site of the pilgrimage is on the doorstep, the city of Love, inexhaustible fount of pleasure, frustration and complexity. The film's three segments are all, in the broadest sense, triangles: Esther suspects that her boyfriend Horace is seeing someone else, and then by chance meets the someone else in question; an unnamed woman, her relationship with her long-time partner on the rocks, meets an unnamed man in a series of locations, unwilling to take things beyond a certain level; a painter is set up with a Swedish visitor and takes her to the Picasso museum, but then finds his attention drawn to someone else, ending up without either woman. Rohmer's genius with such material lies in his extreme attention to detail and awareness of contingency, for example of how the slightest change in the existing dynamic or equilibrium might disrupt something that might otherwise have tenuously held together; the film's final scene points to how one never knows what may live in the memory, or may count as a compensation. Regardless that the characters are mostly living fairly basic lives, financially speaking, it's hard not to view the film as a kind of aspirational fantasy, in which disappointments and compromises are as intoxicatingly necessary as the moments of fulfilment, all of it a reason to keep walking and talking and flirting, and ending things and beginning others.
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